Ben Robinson

“Ondaatje’s books are still transportative, bringing me back to that Romantic teenager, vacant and floaty. Some of the poems are likewise a bit mythic and removed for me now, as though they were written in calligraphy (a writer-in-residence I met with called Ondaatje “Baroque”) but he has a way with image that has stuck with me: walking confidently through a door in the hopes of escaping a poetry reading only to end up in a broom closet, a seagull carrying a dog’s still-seeing eyeball up through the clouds, rolling a retired outhouse across a front lawn so it can be repurposed as a chicken coop.”